Pay Per Click vs Search Engine Optimization

Posted by | Posted in Online Business, Promotion and Marketing | Posted on 07-12-2009

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A Look At The Reasons For And Against Trying Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization For Your Website Marketing

Looking at two of the ways of promoting your company using Online Marketing in terms of their positive and negative aspects may help you to select which method to use for your own company.

Firstly we will consider the pay per click method, a way of making sure that you are visible to the people searching for your chosen keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links portion of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The biggest is the speed at which results are produced. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within seven days you will have some very valuable information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will increase immediately and as long as you are selling what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click ad your sales should follow not far behind.

Another great part of the pay per click method is that if you do happen to get something wrong, say in the picking your keywords, it is clear very quickly. You can identify in a matter of days that although you are getting loads of clicks through to your website no one is buying anything. This will prompt you to review your campaign before too much money has been poured down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to specify your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will pay no more that the maximum you yourself have chosen.

On the negative side it can still work out very pricey as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the price of other forms of advertising stays steady no matter how many customers it provides. Also there is proven data that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings draw ten times the number of clicks that pay per click do, suggesting that a lot of searchers would prefer not to use them.

Now turning to Search Engine Optimization we can see a much slower method. As it is organic or natural it usually takes a matter of weeks before any improvement is made and then as the clients website steadily climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over the following period. This is certainly no quick fix. Another issue with it, unlike pay per click, is that because of it’s speed, if you do get the keywords slightly out at the beginning you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually spot the mistake. This is one of the reasons why getting some expert advice from a Search Engine Optimization Company may well be a cost effective idea.

On the positive side if you do have an ongoing sales company the effort and the wait is absolutely worth it. The costs from the search engine optimization company, after an upfront fee are usually a small amount, say ?15 per week for every keyword that achieves a search engine placement ranking on page 1. Bearing in mind the increased number of customers to your site from the organic listing this works out far far better than pay per click.

So on the whole it seems that pay per click is brilliant for immediate business and for one off sales. Whereas Search engine optimization seems to lend itself to the online marketing of steady medium to long term business.